A Vibe Check on Mindfulness, Meaning, and Growing Up
Okay, real talk. If you’ve spent any time on wellness TikTok, you’ve been told approximately one billion times to “just breathe,” “stay present,” and “vibe with the now.” Meditation apps, breathing exercises, five-minute journaling — it’s everywhere, and honestly a lot of it works. Slowing down helps and regulating your nervous system helps.
But here’s the plot twist nobody tells you: sometimes being “fully present” feels less like peace and more like being trapped in a room with no windows. If you’ve ever tried to meditate your way through heartbreak, a family blow-up, or that 2 am spiral about who you even are — and it just made you feel more broken because the calm wouldn’t come — you’re not doing mindfulness wrong. You might just be missing a piece of the puzzle.
The Problem With “Just Be Present”
A psychiatrist who’s spent years sitting across from patients wrestling with this exact issue put it bluntly: an obsession with only the present moment can leave the deeper stuff — the big questions about who you’re becoming, what your life means, why any of this matters — completely unaddressed. Humans aren’t wired to live only in the now. We’re storytelling creatures and those stories are not crafted in isolation, as much as the ‘me’ gen would have us believe. We (the collective us and you/me personally) stretch backward into memory and forward into hope, and when you cut off that forward-facing part of yourself, you lose a major source of meaning.
Basically: sitting still in a burning building doesn’t put out the fire. Sometimes what you actually need isn’t more presence — it’s a reason to believe your story keeps going somewhere good.
Meet the Metaphorical Four Characters Running Your Brain
This is where it gets genuinely fascinating. Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor — who studied the brain professionally and survived a massive stroke that temporarily silenced half of hers — came up with a framework that splits your mind into four distinct “characters,” each running from a different brain region:
- Character 1 (Left Thinking): your inner planner. Logical, detail-obsessed, always thinking about past and future.
- Character 2 (Left Emotional): your inner alarm system. Protective, anxious, quick to sound the siren when something feels threatening.
- Character 3 (Right Emotional): your inner kid. Present-focused, playful, soaks up joy and connection.
- Character 4 (Right Thinking): your inner mystic. Big-picture, intuitive, feels connected to something larger than yourself.
Here’s the thing modern life keeps getting wrong: most of us live almost entirely in Characters 1 and 2 — planning and panicking, planning and panicking — which is basically a recipe for burnout and anxiety on repeat. The goal isn’t to mute your inner planner or silence your inner alarm. It’s to stop letting them run the whole show 24/7.
The Brain Huddle: A Cheat Code for Spiralling
When you’re overwhelmed, Taylor’s model offers a simple five-step reset, sometimes called a “Brain Huddle”:
- Breathe — actually pause for a minute or two. Emotions move through your body fast if you let them.
- Recognise — name what’s happening. “Oh, this is my anxious character talking.”
- Appreciate — don’t fight the feeling, just acknowledge it’s trying to help, even clumsily.
- Inquire — ask what it actually needs and that search has to go beyond the ‘me and mine’ myopia or social media bubble that so readily screams for our attention.
- Navigate — then looking up and out (not just in to the limited space that is your bubble) deliberately shift toward a character that serves you better right now, whether that’s the playful one or the big-picture one.
It sounds almost too simple, but that’s kind of the point. You’re not trying to delete anxiety or force happiness. You’re learning to notice which “character” has the mic and choosing, on purpose, who gets to speak next.
So What Do You Actually Do With All This?
Put these two ideas together and you get something way more useful than “just breathe”:
Presence isn’t the whole answer, and neither is escaping into fantasy about the future. What actually helps is holding both — grounding yourself in the moment, see a path and resources beyond yourself and then letting yourself imagine who you’re becoming. Ask yourself questions like: Where do I fit in the Big Picture, and Who and who was that crafted? What do I want my journey and story to be about in that space? Who am I when I’m not in panic mode? What matters to me beyond this one hard week?
That’s not toxic positivity. It’s giving your brain’s “big picture” character — the one that sees patterns, connection, and possibility — some actual airtime instead of letting your inner alarm run the whole meeting and merely cycling through your already limited ‘inner resources.’
Wait — Meaning and Purpose Aren’t the Same Thing
Quick vocab check, because this trips up basically everyone: “purpose” and “meaning” get used like synonyms, but they’re not. Whilst you can find meaning in purpose, it also follows that meaning can evaporate if purpose ends.
Purpose is the goal-tracker voice — the “what am I supposed to be doing with my life” energy. It’s very Character 1 (your inner planner): resume-building, five-year-plan-having, gold-star-chasing. Purpose is useful. It’s also a trap when it’s the only thing you’ve got, because purpose is fragile — it can get cancelled by a bad semester, a rejection, an injury, a diagnosis. If your whole sense of self is “I am my purpose,” losing the purpose can feel like losing yourself.
Meaning is bigger and steadier. It’s not “what am I accomplishing” — it’s “what is this actually for. Lady Gaga once spruicked; “I was born this way’, but meaning asks a more important and empowering question… “Was I born for this way!” Meaning is the thing that lets you survive a season where your purpose falls apart. The psychiatrist we mentioned earlier pointed to something wild: people who sit with the fact that life is finite — genuinely finite, not abstractly finite — often come out less anxious, not more. Death awareness has a way of shrinking the small stuff and clarifying what actually matters. That’s a meaning move, not a purpose move.
Viktor Frankl figured this out the hard way, in a concentration camp, of all places. He noticed that people who survived psychologically weren’t always the ones with the clearest five-year plan — they were the ones who’d found meaning: in the people they loved, in the small acts of dignity they could still choose, in the story they were still allowed to tell about themselves even when almost everything else had been stripped away. Purpose can be taken from you. Meaning is something you keep building even in the wreckage.
The Nudge Toward Something Sustainable
Here’s the part that’s easy to skip past but might be the most important: a lot of the frameworks floating around — brain hacks, breathing techniques, personality typing, even meaning-making itself — are really good scaffolding. Scaffolding holds a building up while it’s being built. But scaffolding isn’t a foundation, it’s temporary by design.
So, what’s an actual foundation? Some thinkers who’ve spent decades in this space keep landing on the same three non-negotiables for feeling genuinely whole: true intimacy (real, known-and-still-loved connection with others), true identity (knowing who you are that doesn’t evaporate when your circumstances change), and true spirituality — something durable enough to anchor you when the mood-boosting techniques and the five-year-plans both fail, which, at some point, they will.
That third one gets uncomfortable to talk about, especially when everything else in this post has been very “science-y.” But it’s worth sitting with: if meaning is the thing that outlasts purpose, what’s the thing that outlasts even meaning-making itself? A lot of people — across totally different eras, therapists, scientists, and belief systems — keep circling back to some form of spirituality as that deeper anchor. Not a mood, not a vibe, not a five-minute app session; rather something sustainable enough to actually hold weight.
You don’t have to have this figured out at 19, or 16, or ever, honestly. But it might be worth asking yourself a genuinely different question than “what’s my purpose” — try “what’s the foundation under all of this, the thing that’s still true on my worst day?” That question might take longer to answer. It’s also a lot less likely to crumble.
The Takeaway
You are not broken because five minutes of box breathing didn’t fix your existential dread. Anxiety about who you are and where you’re headed is a normal part of being a person with a future, not a glitch to be meditated away. The move isn’t choosing between “live in the now” and “obsess over what’s next” — it’s learning to notice which part of your brain is currently driving and gently handing the wheel to whichever character actually knows the way forward.
So, keep breathing, keep recognising… Then go be the whole, weird, capacity building human you actually are.
Dalgarno Institute
